We did it. After nearly two months of vegetarianism, we broke our meat fast on Wednesday. I had always envisioned us biting into a huge hamburger or cutting into a nice juicy steak. But beef was not on our minds. Instead we had Chinese.
As are most things like this, it was kind of anti-climatic. We got an obscene amount of food (but not enough that it required the waiter to bring over an extra table. Yes, this happened to Andrew and I before. A story for another day. Actually, that’s the whole story. We ordered a lot of food. It would not fit on our table. Another table was brought over to accommodate our many plates of food. Many Koreans laughed at us.) and ate and ate and ate. I’m glad meat is back in my life.
The hardest part about being a vegetarian was just that it was inconvenient. When going to a restaurant, instead of 15 options there were two. At work, the only options in the cafeteria were pizza or salad. It required planning. When we started this challenge I was excited to discover lots of new vegetarian recipes and cook all sorts of crazy meals. But when it came down to it, by the time I got home at night, I just wanted to cook up some dumplings and make a quick and easy meal. I was too tired to come up with an elaborate meal. I had no real reason to be a vegetarian, so all of the extra steps required in planning my meals were just annoying.
With that being said, it wasn’t terrible. If I had to be a vegetarian for some reason, I could do it. I never felt bad during the past few months nor did I gain a lot of weight from constantly eating bread and pizza all the time. I did get to try a few new recipes and Andrew and I did try lots of new meat substitutes (verdict: knowing something is masquerading as meat makes it not as appealing. Fess up on your non-meatness and it’s much better).
All-in-all, it was a good challenge. But I’m not planning on being a vegetarian anytime soon.